12/11/2023 0 Comments Cash chong invisible blanket![]() ![]() No, quite the opposite: Jeremiah's grief could hardly be more personal. ![]() Jeremiah's not just grieving over what he watches on TV. For the hurt of my poor people, I am hurt I mourn, and dismay has taken hold of me."Īnd of course it's not just theoretical. ![]() "My joy is gone, grief is upon me, my heart is sick. With the enemy very much at the gates, and hopes of some obvious deliverance dashed, as destruction of his country becomes more and more evident, Jeremiah's righteous anger descends into grief. There's something more than anger: it really is mourning. Australia, maybe?" But there's something more than anger in the words of Jeremiah this morning, and something more than anger even in the bickering and self-aggrandizing loud-mouthing that accompanies so much of our modern political discourse. I told you this was going to happen - we saw it two years ago, and I said then that this was just going to keep happening, and you didn't believe me or you all still voted them into office or frankly we just get the politicians we deserve and you all get the politicians you deserve and Oh! that I might leave my people! Canada seems nice. If any of this sounds familiar, it may be because the current media climate in this country is saturated with this strain of Jeremiah. they have grown strong in the land for falsehood. So yeah, it sounds a bit like anger: "Oh, that I had in the desert a traveler's lodging place, that I might leave my people and go away from them! For they are all adulterers, a band of traitors. ![]() And of course it's not bad enough that the Israelites disobeyed God and brought this wrath upon themselves they haven't even particularly listened to Jeremiah, even though he did at one time have the ear of the King, but they have wanted nothing of his visions. The Babylonians have a habit of removing their conquered people back to Babylon itself, and so this invasion threatens to separate Israel from the land that God had given unto her for Jeremiah, there's no explanation for this other than that God is punishing Israel for her failure to keep the covenant they swore together upon the entrance into that land, upon the moment when they stopped wandering through the wilderness so many generations ago. The city of Jerusalem is about to fall to the armies of Babylon, the exact historical event that Jeremiah has been warning them of for what must feel like years at this point. For Jeremiah, as apparently for us, the time for reason has past, and it is simply the time for mourning.Īt first, it might sound a bit like anger. But now, as the time for reason has apparently evaporated from our national political conversation, so too has the lectionary moved us from Luke's financial advice to the powerful, passionate, probing lamination of the weeping prophet, Jeremiah. We have attempted to do so with as much theological reason as possible. For the past several weeks, the lectionary has led us through the central parables of the Gospel of Luke, and so we have had occasion to think in some depth about Luke's theological relationship with money and wealth. Jeremiah is a good thing to read in a week when the country feels like it's falling apart. ![]()
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